Mayor Bill de Blasio has cancelled a graffiti-eradication program targeted at cleaning private buildings. He is thus deliberately sending New York City back to its worst days of crime and squalor.
The symbolic significance of this cancellation is as large as its practical effect. Nothing sent a stronger signal in the late 1980s that New York was determined to fight back from anarchy than the transit system’s campaign against subway graffiti. That campaign was based on Broken Windows theory, the most transformative idea in urban policy over the last 40 years. Broken Windows recognizes that physical disorder and low-level lawlessness—graffiti, turnstile-jumping, and litter—telegraph that social control in a disordered environment has broken down. That low-level lawlessness invites more contempt for public norms of behavior, including felony crime.
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